First in a series: Needed Inventions, a list

Molly January 27th, 2010 No Comments

In this case, a word. Someone should invent a word for when someone is more famous to you than their empiric famosity quotient should yield. My ur-example is Julian Barnes. He’s not necessarily famous on the street in the United States. Probably, when you get down to it, not famous on the street in London. But if x represents a numeric value of his fame, when I saw him walking past my desk at Morning Edition in Washington DC, I experienced x as some sort of integrated equation. Or a cube of x. See? Math doesn’t do it justice.

This is coming up because I realized that for every word there is or should be an antonym. If this word existed, so too would its inverse. Which is when you mention someone’s name in Los Angeles and it’s supposed to mean something to the other person but your sense of the mentioned person’s fame and the mentioned person’s actual fame are diverse, and the actual value is smaller. Thus, an invention of a word for someone being famous-to-you would also yield a word for someone being not-famous-to-you. And if you heard that second word you would know to back away slowly from its speaker.

The Ettes! And Robert Christgau. And me. Agree. About The Ettes!

Molly January 27th, 2010 No Comments

Last week I got to sit in the third row of an Ettes show the night before their real show. They were brilliant.

Apparently Robert Christgau sort of agrees with me. Also apparently they’re making a video, possibly based on a great work of film art. Paging casting!

Conan’s short goodbye

Molly January 23rd, 2010 No Comments

It makes sense that a comedy writer would be able to navigate the difference between irony, satire, cynicism and just plain snark. From the end of Conan O’Brien’s last show:

To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism- it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

Reclaiming hope in comedy, in the darkest part of your career, is a foreceful, defiant act. Which is of course why I like it; which is of course why it is inspiring.